Friday, January 18, 2008

Dog blogging

When I was a kid my mother used to say quite frequently, "You're just like your aunt!" (my dad's sister), and it wasn't a compliment, which I didn't understand until I was much older. When I was 11-12, we went to St. Paul for her ordination as a Lutheran minister; how freaking cool is that? Not cool in my mother's family: Kinder, Küche, Kirche--but when they say Kirche they don't mean "lead the service", they mean "fill the pews and shut up." And yet, if all God wanted us to do was make pies and babies, he would have made us pretty and dumb instead of, well, how we are.

[I've been reading a biography of Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky, the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who really pushed the "women's place" business the same way his grandfather did, which about the time my mother's ancestors were leaving northern Germany for Iowa. That part of the book seemed very familiar somehow.]